


Ill is it to Do the Wrong and Leave the Right Undone

by Gyre_and_Gimble



Series: Endgame Epilogue [1]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Astral Projection, Awkward Romance, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Cloak of Levitation (Marvel), Consensual Mind Control, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extra Baggage Charges Apply, FrostStrange, Humor, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki Lives (Marvel), Loss of Powers, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Natasha Romanov Lives, PTSD symptoms, Peter Parker & Shuri Friendship, Peter might have a bit of a crush tho (background), Physical Disability, Relearning Powers, Smart Hulk (Marvel), Soft Magic Boys, Soul Forge Magic, Tony Stark Lives, bad memories, visual impairment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:07:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyre_and_Gimble/pseuds/Gyre_and_Gimble
Summary: After Tony makes it through the battle in Endgame, he and the Avengers realize that his snap did much more than turn Thanos and his army to dust. A distress signal from Vormir and bizarre readings from a familiar galaxy beg the question: what else might the fourth snap have done?A series of vignettes from different perspectives on what the world looks like after the interdimensional catastrophes that are four total infinity-gauntlet snaps. Loki's return leads us into the Strangefrost content.
Relationships: Loki/Stephen Strange
Series: Endgame Epilogue [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902640
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	1. The Fourth Snap

**Author's Note:**

> These are (somewhat) deliberately out of order; chapter two will be the prologue leading up to the events of this chapter. I'm just getting back into the swing of creative writing and I'm trying to suss out what I need to focus on to improve. I'd love any and all thoughts you might have on how I can make each chapter a little better than the last one.

Thor left a crater in the flagstones outside of Tony’s summer home. The Landtag of Salzburg had grown accustomed to the unorthodox comings and goings from the estate nestled high in the Alps, tucked back under a jutting cliff face that rendered the place unassailable from anywhere but its front – but the pillar of fractured light that deposited Thor would perhaps require a supplemental explanation.

Tony wheeled himself out from under the Rolls Royce parked in the driveway. He was in the process of wiping his hands and selecting a one-liner from the list FRIDAY had helpfully provided in his low-profile HUD, when Thor stumbled and fell, holding something in his arms like he was shielding Tony from a grenade. Tony quickened his pace as FRIDAY attempted to assess Thor’s condition.

His skin had a bluish-grey pallor, there was no color to his lips, and his eyes were distant and unseeing. Cold sweat gave him a sickly sheen and his knuckles were white as they gripped what looked like a metal canister, small enough to hold in both of his arms but large enough that Tony could make out some of the runes carved into it. They looked to be Asgardian, but further investigation had to wait.

It had taken the better part ten minutes just to get Thor inside, even with assistance from Barton and Romanov; the entire process was made more difficult by Thor’s refusal to surrender his cargo. Tony counted himself fortunate as a familiar, dagger-like ache flared up in his shoulder; he wasn’t sure how he’d have gotten four hundred pounds of Asgardian warrior-king into the medical bay by himself. 

Romanov was checking Thor’s pulse, searching his blank eyes. “His heart’s running a mile a minute.”

Tony scratched at the grey spot on his temple. “Get Banner,” he said, “bring him upstairs. See what this thing Thunder Cat’s holding on to is.”

Romanov was off like a shot. Barton stepped closer to Tony as FRIDAY provided them with a midair holographic display in the shape of Thor’s body.

“I’m afraid it’s not very good news, Boss,” FRIDAY reported. “His cellular structure is quite different from Earth’s inhabitants, but the effects of prolonged exposure to ionized radiation are causing them to mutate and propagate much like a cancer.”

Tony selected and blew up a rendering of the cells in Thor’s abdomen as they split and deformed under his skin. Red and orange readouts bled information as Tony plucked and prodded icons on the holo-screen. “Is baby running a fever?” he asked.

“At nearly fifty degrees Celsius, I should say so, Boss.”

Tony looked over his shoulder. “Barton, be a dear and get our man some ice.”

Clint moved without a word.

The setting sun accompanied Thor’s arrival. Dusk saw him laid out on a maglev cot in Tony’s lab, tended to by the friends he had left behind nearly a year ago. By midnight Tony and Bruce had made the decision to freeze him.

“We can’t be sure of anything, here,” Bruce had mumbled, “except for thermodynamics. That’s the one thing that seems to generally hold true in most places at most times, given the data we have on Asgardians. Hot things move a lot, cold things move a little - should slow down whatever's happening to his body.”

Tony had glared at him half-heartedly. “I know thermodynamics, Banner – I’m not a toddler.”

Bruce had shrugged. “What can I say? I talk when I’m nervous,” he'd confessed while initiating the starting sequence. They had managed to get Thor into a modified soul forge – the same piece of Asgardian tech that _hadn’t_ been able to help Dr. Foster during her brief trip to the neighboring dimension years ago. 

Tony double-checked numbers he knew were right while plucking away at the shimmering orange curtain of the forge. “Why so scared, Big Green?”

“Not scared, nervous."

“Difference?”

Bruce gingerly removed and folded his glasses. “Cryostasis is an imperfect science. We’ve made leaps in the past few decades, sure, but Thor is Asgardian, and we don’t know what’s wrong with him. There is every possibility this thing he’s got is something new and dangerous; what if it wakes up while he’s asleep?”

The mystery of Thor’s space souvenir was one they hadn’t yet had time to solve. After he had been satisfied that the thing wasn’t dangerously radioactive and didn’t seem like it wanted to explode, Tony had decided it wasn’t worth trying to pry it out of Thor’s impossible grip.

Tony shrugged. “We’ll either kill it or make it breakfast. Just like old times.”

Banner sighed as he pressed the final button in the sequence, a sleek, transparent shield hissing quietly into place above Thor. As the temperature plummeted and Thor’s vitals slowed to a crawl, Bruce said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”


	2. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of my research for this portion of the story was done via Kurzgesagt and SciShow, on YouTube. A super smart friend suggested that I provide links to those videos, in case anyone else was interested. I'll try to track them down and edit them in soon - but I figured for now I could at least provide the names of the channels I use. Happy learning!

**Prologue: Eleven Months Ago ******

********

********

Tony drew his hands down his face, rubbing at his eyes. “F.R.I.D.A.Y., honey, tell me there’s a really, _really_ great reason for me to be in the astronomy lab at four in the morning.”

“Strange readings out of Andromeda-3, Boss.”

His favorite chair squeaked as he dumped himself into it. F.R.I.D.A.Y’s holo-screens blinked into life in the space above Tony’s workbench. Mercifully, F.R.I.D.A.Y had put a soft orange filter over the bright lights in the lab’s ceiling, sparing Tony’s eyes the pain of additional squinting. A single button press saw a porcelain demitasse of scalding coffee rise from a gently hissing, micro-pneumatic tube built into the desk’s main console.

“Neutrino oscillations far outside the standard deviation, even controlling for recent Higgs field disturbance resulting from increased traffic,” F.R.I.D.A.Y began, centering a screen that displayed a dark, fairly barren corner of the galaxy.

“Traffic from where?”

“Photon analysis suggests dispersion of Anulax isotopes following warp-speed acceleration.”

Tony frowned. “Anulax, like ‘Anulax batteries’?”

“That’s right, Boss.”

The Sovereign. Of course. Leave it to the most self-important race of golden jerks ever known to be the ones screwing with his sleep schedule. Tony felt himself scowling at the rendering of the Andromeda-3 sector that blinked to life on the screen suspended at his eye level. 

F.R.I.D.A.Y continued, “This area shares an energy signature consistent with the presence of Asgardian spacecraft and lifeforms. Doctor Banner hypothesized that it may have been the site of a link between Asgard’s dimension and our own. It is also a likely candidate for the site at which the ship carrying the last of Asgard’s refugees was destroyed.”

Banishing the emptied demitasse to a far corner of his desk, Tony leaned forward, zooming in on the area F.R.I.D.A.Y was talking about and scanning the readouts she provided along the screen’s margin.

“Optics begin to lose fidelity at around 750,000 parsecs, but even accounting for a relatively wide margin of error –”

Tony interrupted: “What are the coordinates of the nearest neutron star?”

The numerals populated in the margin of the holo-screen. Tony did some quick trigonometry.

He sat back. “That shouldn’t be possible,” he observed blandly.

“Right you are, Boss.”

Tony moved, picking up a tablet as he crossed the lab. “Pull up everything we have on anti-quark oscillations for this area and the surrounding space objects – asteroids, planets, space junk. Anything and everything going back to…”

He stumbled. How long had it been? Four years? Five? How was that even possible?

“Since the snap,” he said at last.

F.R.I.D.A.Y was awkwardly silent. Then, gently, “Which one, Boss?”

Tony closed his eyes. “Right, yeah – the last one. My one.”

“On it, Boss.”

Half an hour, three coffees and several frantic phone calls later, Tony was joined in his lab by a groggy Banner and a video feed displaying one highly annoyed Stephen Strange. 

“I fail to see what I have to contribute to your stargazing, Stark,” Strange groused, “and therefore find myself uncertain why I am awake and on a conference call with you and the jolly green giant.”

Banner grumbled, “Not so jolly right now, but thanks.” He swiveled in the special chair Tony had designed for him after one too many lab surfaces had buckled under the stress of Doctor Hulk’s casual leaning. “Tony, you know there’s not enough here to say for sure –”

Tony paced. “I don’t need to be sure. I just need to know if there’s a possibility.”

Banner gave a helpless shrug. “I mean, sure, yeah – there’s always a possibility, but the data doesn’t support –”

With a series of gestures, Tony gathered up all of the holo-screens except for the one with Strange on it, turning around and throwing them into the space in front of him so that Banner and Strange could see what F.R.I.D.A.Y had shown Tony. Moments passed in silence, with Strange’s expression gradually shifting away from rancorous fatigue towards curiosity and puzzlement. 

Banner slowly stood and approached one of the screens, removing his glasses as he looked more closely. “This… shouldn’t be possible,” he muttered.

Tony pointed at the ceiling. “That’s what she said.”

Strange spoke up, wide awake. “You said the Sovereign had been through there recently – why?” 

Tony shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, magic man.”

Strange ran a hand through his disheveled hair, jostling the camera. “I know a guy,” he sighed. “I’ll tap him and see if he knows why the Sovereign were warping through.”

Tony flashed him a gratuitously toothy smile. “Thanks, babe. Love you – mean it.”

Strange disconnected his video with a disgusted sound.

“Tony,” Banner began, “if F.R.I.D.A.Y is right, and if what you’re suggesting is true…”

Bruce turned to face him. “Captain Marvel is off god-knows-where and we don’t have any more Asgardian or Kree ships to use for parts. That only leaves Thor.” Bruce frowned plaintively. “We can’t ask him to go back there.”

Tony grimaced. He knew he certainly wouldn’t want to return to the place where most of his remaining friends and loved ones had been brutally murdered and/or vaporized by a megalomaniacal titan. That Thor had survived the ordeal himself was nothing short of a miracle. It seemed highly unlikely that anyone or anything else could have made it.

But what if something had? What if _someone_ had?

“If it was you,” Tony muttered at last, “wouldn’t you want to know?”

Bruce looked ready with a reply but stopped himself short, mumbling noncommittally. 

“If there was even the slightest chance,” Tony continued as he closed the space between them, “that someone you had loved and lost wasn’t actually lost, wouldn’t you want to know?”

Moments passed in silence between them before Banner deflated with a sigh. “I’ll call him,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not perfectly happy with this or the previous chapter, but I've been looking at them for so long I'm not sure my editing judgment remains sound. At this point I'm trying to build up believable world around the idea that Tony didn't die when he did his snap, and in which there is hope for the reclamation of people thought to be gone for good.
> 
> I just want these poor babies to be happy ;__:
> 
> ALSO: It occurred to me as I was editing that the exchange between Tony and Strange might be confusing, since that's a ship I'm not 100% sure I'm going to explore in this series. This is Tony being... the way he is.


	3. Possible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This vignette takes place immediately after the Endgame battle, from Strange's perspective.

None of the 14,000,605 futures Strange had seen extended past Tony’s snap – but in looking through all of them so quickly (he hadn’t exactly been spoiled for time), he failed to predict that this timeline would go on with Tony still in it. It had seemed clear that he was meant to die… But then Thor was there. As Tony’s breath had stilled and his eyes had darkened, Thor was there, gathering Tony into his arms and racing through a spark-spitting portal he’d demanded that Strange conjure. A handful of others had followed behind.

He’d done it to humor them, he had thought; Strange had been sure that efforts to revive or preserve Tony’s life would ultimately fail, but when faced with the choice between shooting down the hopes of his friends and indulging them, he’d opted for the latter.

It didn’t feel like the kinder thing.

Strange expected chaos at the tower – the chaos of triage, of assessing and treating traumatic injuries, of new grief and the reckoning of a war’s end – and chaos he did find. Emergency lights that sat recessed in the walls, close to the ground, guided him to the medical bay of the Avengers’ tower. The injured and dying helped each other find first aid, places to rest, water to drink. 

With a steadying breath Strange slowed to a stop, let his shoulders fall and reached for what power he had left. A snap of his wrists produced a shower of orange sparks and a deep, grating ache in his hands that he felt all the way up to his teeth. He spent a moment assuring himself that the tremors were truly gone, that his medical training would be of use, before hurrying on down the hall. 

The med bay door hushed aside as he approached. Four exam tables on either side of the room hemmed in an open corridor that allowed crash carts and gurneys to travel smoothly between them. All exam tables were occupied, but no one was being treated. Barnes and Rogers stood next to each other by the door, bloodied and bruised and entirely focused on the far side of the room. Peter was stretched out on the third table down, applying pressure to his thigh where blood had bloomed across the surface of his suit. Next to him stood Thor and Rhodes, the latter of whom was sporting an improvised sling on his right arm. Strange scanned the room and took in the strained and desperate expressions of every standing Avenger and most of their allies, his eye ultimately drawn to that which held their attention.

There, at the farthest end of the medical bay, laid atop a table with a softly illuminated surface, was Tony. Strange knew that Thor had brought a soul forge back to Earth with him at some point, but Strange hadn’t had an opportunity to see it for himself. Orange light undulated through the space above the table, branching and flowing into a facsimile of the broken body beneath it. Lights in red and black congealed around the shape’s skull, neck, ribs and arms, twisting through and over its trunk as Shuri frantically tapped, pulled and pushed on areas of half-solid light.

Strange was vaguely aware that people were speaking but couldn’t make any of it out as he walked down the bay. Wakanda’s brightest engineer was assisted by its king on the opposite side of the table, while Maximoff held unsteady hands to Tony’s temples. The reddish light of her magic coiled and flowed around Tony’s head like a sickly sort of crown. As Strange drew nearer he saw tears running down her face, leaving grimy streaks in the dirt and blood.

“You are doing great, Wanda,” Shuri said tightly. “That’s perfect. Hold on.”

A sob made it past Wanda’s clenched teeth. “It’s too much,” she whimpered.

“Not for you, it isn’t,” Shuri insisted. 

Strange hadn’t realized that Carol Danvers – “Captain Marvel”, wasn’t it? – was standing in the far corner until she came up behind Wanda and put a hand on her shoulder. The ringing in his ears kept Strange from hearing what Carol said, but Wanda’s stunned expression and the flash in her eyes told him that a power exchange was taking place.

For what was just as likely to have been hours as minutes, the fight continued: Shuri and T’challa, Wanda and Carol and, eventually, Mantis, Nebula and Banner all stretched themselves to breaking as they struggled to keep Tony alive, and the rest just… watched. Strange wanted to tell them to stop, that they could rest and focus on healing the friends who were still here with them, who had a chance. 

He wasn’t sure what kept him from doing it.

There were no huzzahs, no sighs of relief when he stabilized – just the grim tension of a life floating precariously between living and dead. Eventually, Strange did begin to administer first aid where possible and more serious intervention where needed. Peter’s leg took thirteen stitches to close up; Colonel Rhodes had a fractured radius that needed setting; Barnes had been dealt a blow to his flesh-and-blood arm that had either shocked or damaged the nerves enough that he could barely twitch his fingers. 

When his magic had begun to falter and the tremor in his hands returned, Strange let himself fall into a chair beside a blood-streaked – but blessedly empty – exam table.

Carol sidled up next to him. “Wanda was keeping his brain alive,” she murmured, “while Shuri and T’challa worked on his body.”

Strange rubbed at his eyes. “And how did that go?” he asked lifelessly.

Carol pulled up a chair and sat in front of him. “Here.”

Strange wasn’t sure how long he’d been holding his head in his hands, but when he did look up it was to see Carol offering him a bottled water. He fought against what felt like leaden weights to reach for it, but, exhausted as he was and with none of his magic left to draw upon, his fingers were too unsteady to grip it. Carol wordlessly withdrew it, cracked the cap off, and crouched next to Strange’s knee.

“Here,” she said, somewhat more gently, as she held it up for him to drink.

Strange tried to wave his hands at her. “You don’t have to.”

Carol smirked. “C’mon, Doc.”

Shaking his head only worsened his bullet of a headache, but he insisted, “I’m fine, Carol.”

She was unmoved. “We both know that’s not true,” she said conversationally, narrowing her eyes, “but if you quit being a stubborn ass, I’ll keep this just between us. Okay?”

He didn’t have the energy left to fight, so he thanked her and drank.

“Can I ask you something, Doctor?”

Strange crossed his arms, slumping forward slightly. “You can certainly try.”

Her eyes felt heavy on him. “How is he still alive?”

Strange felt his gaze wander to the soul forge, to the body half-entombed in broken armor, to the people who kept a weary watch over it. He saw their desperation, how important this was to them – but what they were after wasn’t possible. It _shouldn’t_ be possible.

_Was it possible?_

He allowed himself a deep sigh. He’d earned it.

“I don’t know,” he told Carol, “but as a medical doctor, I wouldn’t bank on him waking up.”  
_________________________

It took Tony six weeks to wake up.

Strange tried to make a point of only visiting Tony when he was reasonably sure he would be alone; he hadn’t gotten any better at hopeful platitudes over the years and didn’t want to upset anyone. It seemed that he wasn’t the only one skeptical about Tony’s recovery, but Strange had the distinct impression that he was the only one stuck on the fact that Tony shouldn’t have survived in the first place.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want Tony to pull through – of course he did – but as a doctor and as a sorcerer it seemed utterly inconceivable that a human mind and body could withstand the combined power of all six infinity stones used in tandem. He felt certain that, had it been him, _he_ would not have survived. It was only after hours spent thinking this way that Strange finally recognized what was bothering him:

It felt like cheating.

The universe operates under a set of rules. They aren’t always clear, and they’re not always consistent, but there are some things that simply can’t be. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they make contact. Heat and light and energy are one and the same, at a basic level. And ordinary mortal creatures cannot survive drawing universe-level amounts of power into themselves to accomplish what could reasonably be described as a miracle, and live to tell about it. It just didn’t happen.

_A first time for everything,_ he would come to suppose.

It was very late at night or very early in the morning, somewhere between a Thursday and a Sunday. Strange was reading in the astral plane as his body rested on a sofa that had been brought into the medical bay some days after the end of the war. Most of their number were occupied with the relief effort, search and rescue, and the reinstitution of law and order during the day. They made time to sit next to Tony anyway, for minutes or hours – whatever they could spare, whenever they could spare it.

It was as he sat cross-legged in midair that Strange felt… something, like a presence over his shoulder. He cast his eyes across the empty room, to the clean exam tables and low lights, to the soft glow of the soul forge that seemed to shine more brightly the longer he looked at it.

Strange stood and glided to the head of the table, his book abandoned on the floor. He placed his hands on the forge’s surface, surprised to find that it offered his projection significant resistance as he applied pressure to it. Frowning, he examined the artifact more closely, minutes later arriving at the conclusion that the soul forge interacted with the astral plane, to some extent. Unable to resist, Strange pressed his fingers into the threads of light suspended in the air above Tony’s body. They responded to his attention by growing denser, congealing around his translucent fingers in a way that felt as if Strange was being pulled in. He withdrew his hand, eyes widening at the level of resistance the gesture provoked, like trying to pull his hand from a vat of taffy. 

It was as he managed to extract his hand that the updated interface installed by Wakanda’s design group shimmered into view. White-rimmed holo-screens provided readouts in English and Wakandan Xhosa that detailed Tony’s condition. Strange was less surprised this time when the screens allowed his astral form to manipulate them, to reposition and organize them until one in particular caught his eye.

A standard anterior-posterior model of a human form was overlaid with seven intricate, jagged, slowly-spinning symbols spaced between the sacrum and top of the head, not quite in a straight line. Selecting the lower-most symbol, Strange was able to zoom in, finer details coalescing into what bore a striking resemblance to the Muladhara - the root chakra. Strange scoffed as he remembered his first day at Kamar Taj, the Ancient One patiently showing him diagrams and images of what he had at the time taken to be bullshit alternative medicine. The intervening years made swallowing his skepticism easier this time around.

Portaling between the Avengers’ tower and the New York sanctum via the astral plane was tricky, but within the hour Strange had amassed a small stack of books, three scrolls, and a handful of palm-sized, flat, round stones, depositing all but one of the stones on the med bay floor.

Referring again to the readout he had noticed earlier, he positioned himself above the soul forge, floating parallel to the ceiling and to Tony’s unmoving body. Curious, he attempted to drag the relevant holo-screen from the side wall of the forge to the one above it, glad to find that it worked. 

Strange murmured words to the stone in his hand, waiting for it to heat and glow before reaching down and placing it low on Tony’s abdomen, over the Muladhara. Again, he met resistance, a stickiness that seemed to want to draw him down into the forge. The holo-screen floating in front of him responded to his actions by brightening the lowest symbol on the readout with a low chime and a serene flash of white light. As Strange turned the stone, the broken, jagged lines that ricocheted within the confines of the circle on the display turned and fused until they clicked back together into neat shapes and tight angles. He laughed, breathless and short, before slowly withdrawing his hand and swooping back down to the floor to gather up more of the stones. One by one he imbued them with magic, reached down through the sticky light of the soul forge, and realigned each of Tony’s five lower chakra. The final two, however, presented Strange with a problem.

The Agya chakra on his forehead and the Sahastrar at his crown were displayed in twitching, confused angles of light and dark on the user interface. Strange could feel the gears in his head turning feverishly, stuttering when he reached for his expertise and came up empty. Doubt tugged at him, insistent like the pull of the forge’s light, and he was very nearly ready to abandon the project when his eyes were drawn to Tony’s body beneath him.

He looked… well, he still looked like hell – but there was more color to his cheeks, and the rise and fall of his chest seemed deeper, stronger than it had been in weeks. The doctor’s voice of reason chastised him for surrendering to confirmation bias, but so overwhelmed was Strange with the progress he believed he had made that he could scarcely help but press on.

What came next would become so garbled by noise and light and the odd, push-pull of astral space on physical space that Strange would be hard pressed to say what exactly he had done, or what had happened when he did it. He had the vague sense of having done the inverse of the Ancient One’s astral disembodiment: the sharp blow to his chest that had shucked his astral form out of his physical one when he first arrived at the temple in Nepal. To his knowledge, though, no such technique existed.

Not that his explanation would have mattered much; everyone was focused on the fact that, whatever he did, Strange had brought Tony Stark back from the brink of death.

Mordo’s voice was in the back of Strange’s mind as he stood in the corner of the medical bay, saying something about using magic to violate the laws of nature. Strange wasn’t sure what he might say in response – perhaps something about there needing to be a strong will to live, to keep the chakra open and energy moving through the body. Rhetorical arguments bored him, though, and so he quietly took his leave, gratefully climbing into a warm bed after falling through a conjured portal.


	4. Were it Not That I Have Bad Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda's perspective, set shortly after she helped keep Tony's brain alive following the Endgame battle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I think about a world in which Tony survives, I have to ask myself: what would the consequences be? It seems natural to investigate how he could survive while making an effort to address some of the resources and limitations the rest of the team would have.

Wanda was afraid of the nightmares before she had the first one.

That her power came from the mind stone meant that the thoughts of the people she manipulated stayed with her for some time afterward. Staying in Stark's brain long enough to keep him alive meant that she was one of the only people who would ever know just what that snap had done to him.

He had been prepared to die; he had known what the gesture would mean, known that he and the suit wouldn’t survive it. Wanda felt his resolve, a serene sort of resignation. Nothing could have prepared her for the pain, or for the terrible, devastating weight of the universe as it had crushed itself into her mind. In the half-second it had taken Tony to snap his fingers, he had seen the universe unravel.

There was a terrible beauty to the cosmos that only an omniscient thing could stand to weather. Stark had wanted to turn away, to fall quietly now that he had finished his work – but he couldn’t. The deepest mysteries of existence, the darkest corners of cold, dead space had filled him, unmade him, and still he could not find his peaceful oblivion. He’d felt himself dissolve, dissipate, return to the stars from which he came, only to be spat back out again and again. 

His heart had stopped, his breath had stilled, his eyes were open and unseeing, and still he could not die. Each millisecond was a ceaseless cacophony of noise and light; the violation that his continued existence represented tore him apart with the agonizing slowness of entropy and evolution. Billions of light years assaulted what remained of his battered mind, the flicker of light that wouldn’t be smothered. All Stark had wanted was his end.

Then, for a moment, all had been still. His consciousness had frozen, counted itself lucky that space and time had stopped flinging it across galaxies and through bright-burning stars. 

Wanda recognized herself in his memory: a red light that emerged from the void and settled itself around him. The strands of her power closed in, caging Tony’s awareness, anchoring, tightening, holding him in place. It had somehow been both a relief and an unbearable agony.

_No, no, no._ Wanda heard her own voice alongside Tony's. _No, let me go – I have to go. Stop this._

The anguish of a spirit torn asunder, of a denied annihilation, had overwhelmed what had remained of Stark’s awareness. Soundless screams and desperate pleas for the end went unanswered by the red, pitiless tendrils of light that had dragged his scattered mind back from the disparate corners of the universe to which they had been flung.

Wanda woke slowly, unbearably slowly, as if pulling her own mind back together. She didn’t wake screaming, as she had when she and Pietro had been kept by HYDRA, nor crying, as she had during the two days she’d spent trapped beneath the charred rubble that had once been her home. Wanda laid in bed, paralyzed by the weight of Stark’s experience as if it were hers because, in a way, it was.

She couldn’t bring herself to eat or drink at all for the first few days. An attempt was made to connect her to an IV. Wanda couldn’t conjure enough awareness to know exactly what had happened: it was all flashes of red light and raised voices, the clatter of things hitting the floor. Sometime after that the sound of Clint’s voice had made it through to her clearly enough that she’d turned her face to him. She’d only been dimly aware that he was feeding her, giving her water. 

Weeks passed, and she slowly returned. Speaking was difficult. She hadn’t the words to explain what she’d seen, and it was hard to imagine that anything she could say would matter, in the end. It would be months before she was able to sit with Stark, to speak to him with a far-off voice and unfocused eyes. He would reach for her hand and she would let him take it. He would not thank her, and she would not expect him to. How could anyone be thankful for that?

All he would say is, “I’m sorry,” and Wanda believed him. For the first time in her life the unthinkable had come to pass: she pitied Tony Stark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Re-watching all of the MCU movies to date reminded me how much Wanda hates Tony - and for a damn good list of reasons. I was interested in exploring a scenario in which Wanda was in a position to save Tony's life and figured this poorly-ordered series of vignettes would be as good a place as any to do that.
> 
> I'd love your thoughts and feedback; what did you like, and what do you think I could have done differently?


	5. *Important Update!*

Howdy! Thanks for checking out my work! 

If you're wondering where some of the chapters have gone, fear not! I've moved them into a separate work in the Endgame Epilogue series, entitled "A Strange Frost" (I'm not winning any originality points, here, but I'm okay with that). I'm going to keep this particular work as a separate space for exploring a wider variety of character perspectives, rather than just Loki and Stephen.

In summary: if you want more Strangefrost, go to the next work in the series. If you don't want Strangefrost, then subscribe to this work so you can know when I add someone new!


	6. Darkness Creeps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stephen's thoughts turn... dark.
> 
> Toying with the idea of Dark!Stephen, a version of him that never quite got past the narcissistic surgeon stage of personal development.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: body horror, emotional/mental manipulation

It was by Stephen’s power that this universe still existed, but it seemed that he was the only one who understood that.

Of the fourteen-million-odd possible outcomes of the conflict with Thanos, there was only one that resulted in the continued existence of the human race – the one set in motion by _Stephen_ , when he offered the time stone to Thanos, on Titan. Without that seminal act, there was no Earth, no humanity – no Iron Man or Captain America, no Avengers. And yet, somehow, _they_ were the ones cast as Earth’s mighty heroes. They got the credit and recognition, their silly code names and costume designs laid down in books that would educate a new generation on the history of Earth’s first steps into the intergalactic political sphere.

Stephen wasn’t bitter; he was simply perplexed. He wanted no part of the spandex-clad legion or their ridiculous obsession with themselves and their self-righteous dogma. You let a person play a supporting role in saving the universe, and suddenly they’re the ones garnering the attention – the credit, the recognition.

All of which rightfully belonged to Stephen.

If Stephen _had_ been bitter, surely no one could have blamed him. But he was above that, above the petty squabbling for minutes of fame and slices of glory. He had better things to do – more _interesting_ things to do.

It was his interest in discovering the way things worked that had first brought Stephen to the surgical profession. He had begun taking things apart and putting them back together since he was old enough to appreciate a good vivisection.

Sometimes he just left things apart, though.

He’d learned a lot from Tony, that way – poor, sweet, broken soldier that he was. His was a role that Stephen had been happy to delegate; that he should survive his performance during the final battle with Thanos was something Stephen had failed to foresee. It was in deference to Tony’s providing Stephen with something as novel as a _surprise_ that he left Tony alone, for the most part. Not before he got a good look at that right arm of his, though.

Tony didn’t remember the pain - Stephen wasn’t a cruel man, after all. Stark certainly did feel it, though, as Stephen had meticulously peeled back layers of scorched tissue to see the effect the snap had had on the marrow of Tony’s bones. Tattered nerves sang for Stephen with Tony’s voice, echoing off the perimeter of the ward Stephen had laid to catch the sound before it could reach anyone outside of the medical wing. Stephen’s memory wipe was thorough – refined to perfection through countless, furtive hours of trial and error – and if Tony’s eyes seemed a little haunted, well, certainly no one could blame him. Even without Stephen’s tender care, Tony would be a broken toy for the rest of his days.

Banner was volatile and difficult to predict, at least with his green passenger. On his own, Bruce would have been a delightful pet project for Stephen: all that knowledge, wrapped up in so much insecurity and self-doubt. Stephen imagined coaxing Bruce to the sanctum with the promise of something novel – they were alike, in that way; hungry for what was _new_ , what was _fresh_ – and preventing him from ever leaving. He wouldn’t even need magic to do it.

But, no: Bruce was a poor candidate, as his alter ego had the annoying tendency of coming to his rescue, and Stephen had no desire to waste his time performing repairs on the sanctum.

Natasha was intriguing – Stephen would have almost certainly found something of at least passing interest inside her mind – but she was quick and shrewd and liable to bury a stiletto in his chest before he could get close enough for a proper look. He settled for watching her ingrained paranoia and cynicism slowly unmoor her from her friends, until she was once again a ghost in the wind.

The team’s other arachnid was another matter entirely. Dear, sweet Peter – all that love and nowhere to lay it down. Stephen considered taking him under his wing, shaping him into something diverting. He was young, virile, energetic, with a desperate need for approval that Stephen would be only too happy to provide. The gaping hole in Peter’s life, the center of his universe left empty by Tony’s decline, cried out to be filled. Stephen would do a nice job of filling it, he knew. But playing with pretty young things had lost its novelty somewhere around the tenth charity event he’d been to during his surgical tenure. Toying with Peter’s insecurities and planting conflicting feelings in his mind was amusing, but only for so long.

Barnes was almost too easy. HYDRA had done most of the heavy lifting, laying the groundwork for his behavioral programming. The sergeant wasn’t as well inoculated against his trigger words as he thought he was, and he couldn’t block them out when they were spoken directly into his mind. His teammates were severely discomfited by their erstwhile Winter Soldier’s strange behavior, until he made the wise decision to leave them behind. This created the ideal amount of friction between the remaining members of the already-fractured team, and Stephen was treated to a spectacular view of the fireworks.

It was fortunate that his awareness wasn’t limited in the way most other creatures’ awarenesses were. It would have been a waste for him to miss a watershed of emotional turmoil, or a pithy insult scathingly delivered from the mouth of a friend.

Harm was done, not by Stephen but with his aid, until it seemed that the Avengers were thoroughly scattered – and those that remained together only did so out of a sense of obligation or guilt. And while this puppeteering was rewarding in its own right, once the curtain closed, Stephen was again left alone with his boredom.

What luck that his newest plaything came to him itself.

There wasn’t a single thing about Loki that Stephen _didn’t_ want to take apart: his body, his magical attunement, his bruised psyche and desperate hunger for validation. Stephen devoted weeks to planning out the games he would play. A word of encouragement here, a cold observation there – but above all else his plan relied upon Loki’s developing a romantic interest in the Sorcerer Supreme.

Stephen felt certain he didn’t need to spell out all the reasons Loki should want to bed him, and he was right. They seemed to share a natural sort of chemistry, a fact that lent a satisfied curl to Stephen’s lip as he watched his guest sleep. It was necessary for Loki to have a reprieve from the dreams Stephen planted, at least in these early stages. Soon, though, he would be the only thing Loki thought about.

Each furtive glance and lingering touch told Stephen that he had been correct, and that it was time to press his advantage. It was no effort to insert himself further into Loki’s dreams, populating his mind with fantasies of the sorcerer taking control, delivering pain and pleasure to overwhelming effect. Before the first week of this stage of Stephen’s experiment was through, he had shown Loki the heights of pleasure to which Stephen could bring him, if only he would obey. There was no room in the sanctum that was spared an erotic vision in Loki’s dreaming mind, their bodies entwined, voices raised in shouts of ecstasy and cries of need. Stephen found that he liked the look of Loki on his knees, begging – for what, it seldom mattered. Those high cheekbones and their alabaster skin, made rosy with amorous exertion, a lovely pout and a plaintive, needy frown on his face as he begged and begged – for his own release, for Stephen’s cock, for another sharp blow to his face or to his thighs.

Stephen didn’t know if Loki had enjoyed these things before, but it didn’t really matter. Stephen told Loki he liked them, and Loki did.

Such a good boy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been enamored with the idea of Dark!Stephen ever since reading “Now that I’ve Found You (I Won’t Let You Go)” by the incredibly talented CouldntBeDamned. If this tickles your fancy, definitely go check that one out!
> 
> What did you like about this angle on dark Stephen? What do you think could be improved? Let me know what you think, and if you want more! ＿〆(。。)


End file.
